Paper diaries seem a bit dated for the 21st century, where all text needs to be searchable. Carrying around traditional diaries also seems a little unwieldy when everywhere we go we have an internet-capable device. So here's an alternative - a self-hosted digital diary.

  1. Use Google Drive and set up a form with a few fields that you want to record each day (I suggest fields to record where you are, what you did, how you felt, etc - I also included a few checkboxes for basic health tracking but you can record whatever you want from long-form text to ten bullet points)
  2. Set the form to publish to a Goolge spreadsheet
  3. Go to the live form and copy the code
  4. Edit the page style and save it (you might want to prettify it a bit to strip out Google branding etc)
  5. Upload the form as a page on your website/sub-domain using ftp
  6. Visit that page each day and you've got a form that you can go to that will save your diary online for you

I've been using this for a week and it's awesome. Let me know what you think!